"I know why you've come... they've sent you to bring me back, but that cannot happen.."

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

I felt guilty as I gave one reason I think the removal of attunements is a good thing - you no longer have to help others run their trials.

But isn't that what guilds are about? Isn't that what playing a multiplayer game means? Grouping with others? Them helping you out, you helping them out?

The pang of guilt came from knowing someone is saying "If you can't help your guild get all their trials done, you don't deserve to raid SSC/TK!"

Yes, but sometimes, many times - after you've done a thing - you simply do not want to do it again. And with a game like WoW its more like sometimes, after you've done a thing 50 times, you don't want to do it the 51st time.

But a friend of a friend of a friend just started playing and it would be great if you could run them through Deadmines or Scarlet Monastery or Sunken Temple. Or your raid leader wants to get his alt keyed for Molten Core, or more current day, you finally got your spouse re-subbed and you want to get them attuned for Karazhan. Or you are horde and need a paladin (or alliance and need a shaman) and you need to help them level from 0-70 fast.

I like to call this The Overhead of Social Gaming: a phrase coined in this post by a Everquest player (I posted his "Why I Play Everquest" back when I first started my own blog).

This overhead, explained as "difficulty of coordination, scheduling, training, skill, and group balance" is what led to the burnout I posted so frequently about in my blog's beginnings. Not really wanting to heal, but knowing my guild needed a healer. Not really wanted to raid on Wed, but Priest X had baseball on Wed. Not really having fun raiding, but knowing my guild was having trouble building the raid. Being tired of raiding, but knowing we were just *that* close to killing a boss.

I had a feeling it would become that way with trials. They take a while to do, even more so with a less than optimal set up. And you start noticing certain people always being asked, because they either have the gear, skill, seemingly free time (although just because someone is logged on doesn't mean they want to heal your instance).

So as Loral said, "that strength [of working with a team of other players] can also be a detriment."

Our guild wants to raid, now a small number of us will no longer have to feel like we are shirking responsibilities when we don't schedule a weekend to get more of our guild attuned.

We can still play together, but we won't have to feel strained to do so.

1 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Yeah, it's good to want to help people, such as your guild members. But the nicest person can get burned out on helping people, and it's important for the game to be set up to keep that from happening. That's how I view things like the removal of attunements--it's necessary to keep folks from burning out on helping their guildmates.